A Review of CFD Methods and Their Application to Automobile Aerodynamics

Computational fluid dynamics(CFD) has come out as a modern alternative for reducing the use of wind tunnels in automotive engineering. CFD is now being intensively applied to various stages of aerodynamic design of automobiles. However, the present CFD technology has still many computational problems to be solved in terms of turbulence treatment, numerical method/scheme, etc., i.e., it is still difficult to find an appropriate solution in terms of fluid mechanics, since it strongly depends on the above numerical factors. This review paper describes the following CFD methods now available and their present applications, mainly in the area of vehicle aerodynamics, and shows the present limitations of the various methods: panel method, k-ε turbulence model, Large Eddy Simulation, and quasi-direct simulation with 3rd-order upwind numerical scheme.